Notes |
- Thomas died in the 1838 massacre with Piet Retief.
Description: https://www.eggsa.org/newspapers/index.php/grahamstown-journal/1452-grahamstown-journal-1882-07-july
Grahamstown Journal 1882 07 July
Written by Sue Mackay. Posted in The Grahamstown Journal
Thursday 13 July 1882
DEATH OF THE LAST OF THE WITNESSES OF THE DINGAAN MASSACRE
An esteemed correspondent at Smithfield has furnished the Friend with the following obituary notice of Mrs. BIRD, who was a resident of Bloemfontein about twenty-five years ago, and is well remembered by “old hands”.
Smithfield, July 1 1882
On Monday last there passed away, at the farm of her son-in-law Mr. Thomas HAYWARD, near Smithfield, and in a very ripe old age, a much respected and estimable old lady, Mrs. Jane BIRD, nee WILLIAMS. Mrs. BIRD was born in 1801 in North Wales. In 1837 she accompanied the Rev Francis OWEN on a mission to the Zulus, then ruled by the notorious tyrant chief Dingaan.
Captain GARDNER, who afterwards so miserably perished at the Falklands Islands, was one of her fellow passengers in the Palmyra, which conveyed the mission party to South Africa.
The Rev F. OWEN was allowed by Dingaan to establish himself near his kraal Umginginhlovn, and it was some four months afterwards that the unfortunate Peter RETIEF and his companions arrived at Dingaan’s, where they were massacred on the 7th February 1838. Mrs, BIRD was a horrified spectator of the attack treacherously made upon the farmers by the Zulus in Dingaan’s kraal, in which the whole party of the farmers, together with their interpreter, Mr. Thomas HALSTEAD, was overpowered. The whites were thence dragged out to the usual place of execution and put to a violent death, their bodies being at once abandoned to the vultures, which were being so continuously fed by the atrocious massacres committed by the bloodthirsty Zulu chief. On the Sunday following the massacre, the Rev. F. OWEN’s mission party, including Mrs. BIRD, then Miss WILLIAMS, were expelled by Dingaan, and fled with sick oxen in a wagon to Port Natal, which place it took six weeks to reach. The poor fugitives escaped with only their bedding and the clothes they had on.
The Zulus followed up the massacre of RETIEF and his companions by attacking the various Boer camps, and subsequently they fell on the English settlers at the Port of Natal. Mrs. BIRD then escaped in a small vessel named the Comet to Delgoa Bay, and was taken in the same vessel shortly afterwards to Port Elizabeth.
On the 6th November 1877 Mrs. BIRD’s narrative of these occurrences was committed to writing, and this was published in the Orange Free State Monthly Magazine No.2 Vol.1, in an article headed “Personal Recollections of Dingaan and the Massacre of RETIEF and his Party.” The extraordinary memory of the old lady would have allowed the narrative to have been taken down with much fuller particulars, but the remembrances of the horrible scenes she had witnessed and the terrors she had gone through excited her so much that it was considered unfair to tax her farther.
Mrs. BIRD was buried on Wednesday last at Mr. T. HAYWARD’s farm, Klipplastfontein, and her funeral was numerously attended by people from Smithfield and neighbourhood.
per Jenny Griffith
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